Monthly Archives: February 2018

One dreary day, a professor was sitting at his desk. He jotted down a sentence on a blank paper: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” This line sparked J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of The Hobbit. Later, Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings and it was turned into one of the highest-grossing and critically acclaimed film series of all time. It took J.R.R. Tolkien over a dozen years to plan and write The Lord of the Rings. So how exactly did he manage to complete such a gargantuan task — and write weaving storylines on top of it all? Read more>>

Silicon Valley has long celebrated failure, encouraging founders to aim big and fail fast, pick themselves up, and try again. In that spirit, there’s one big failure to add to the list: Silicon Valley has failed women, period, and it’s time for the industry to own it. Women not only represent half the population but drive 70 to 80 percent of consumer purchases. If only for the sake of profits, women should not be excluded from the process of imagining and creating new products. Readmore>>

Sometimes you travel all the way to Barcelona, only to meet up with a startup that’s been operating right around the block. Waverly Labs is a 20 person Brooklyn-based company that specializes in real-time translation through a pair of Bluetooth earbuds. The product is the culmination of four years of research on both the hardware and software side of the equation, funded by a wildly success Indiegogo campaign that netted the company $4.4 million (around 3,000-percent of its initial goal). Read more>>

Is Bitcoin the future of money? Has the cryptocurrency bubble already popped? It depends who you ask. The topic of Bitcoin is just as polarizing as it is hot. But no matter how volatile Bitcoin stocks may be, its underlying technology, blockchain, has huge potential to transform our industry. Blockchain can clean up the rampant ad fraud and rebuild trust, and more and more companies are popping up to help guide that along. However, it’s not just technology companies that are embracing blockchain in its early stages. Readmore>>

Tyler Odean kicked off our meeting with a contentious statement: “For startups and founders, being persuasive is way more important than having vision.” Given how many thousands of articles have been written about finding and nailing down mission and vision statements, this is jarring to hear. But when he explains, it makes sense. To succeed, startup founders need to cultivate persuasion as a skill and habit he says. “That’s how they’re going to get the funding, the talent, the momentum to make their vision work.” Readmore>>

Stem cells derived from a human placenta hold the key to unlocking a myriad of potentials in regenerative medicine and are the focus of X-Prize and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis’ new endeavor. Called Celularity, the startup is a spinout from Celgene, a global biopharmaceutical company creating gene therapies. Celularity in the hopes of using stem cells found in the human placenta to quickly regenerate tissue and organs needed to treat cancer and other diseases. Read more>>

ICOs are nothing less than a tectonic shift in the startup-funding environment. Alas, one of the most common misconceptions about ICOs is that they allow “non-dilutive financing.” You aren’t selling any shares, so there isn’t any dilution, right? Wrong. Clearly, when selling shares or tokens to investors, the investors expect those to appreciate and increase in value. If that’s the case, they will be sharing some of the future value of your venture, so there must be some dilution hidden here. Read more>>

A common belief is that when we negotiate, we should push hard to get the best possible deal. Indeed, sometimes choosing a power-based strategy and pushing hard can yield great deals. Other times, power-based negotiations can raise resistance and lead to an impasse. But failure aside, the two most likely outcomes of power-based negotiations have long been assumed to be this: If you have more power than the counterparty, you win; otherwise, you lose. However, new research shows a third possible outcome: You may win, but you don’t get the value you expected. Readmore>>

New research from Wharton is changing the way investors are looking at the valuation of businesses by taking a closer look at the worth of those firms’ customers. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader and Dan McCarthy, a professor at Emory University who earned his Ph.D. at Wharton, are behind this new method that has recently received a lot of attention for the insights it generated about the value of businesses including meal delivery services Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, and online furniture retailers Wayfair and Overstock. Read more>>

Cryptocurrency in exchange for your genetic data! Sounds a bit like a scam, but it’s the premise behind a new company founded by a leading geneticist. Nebula Genomics says it plans to sequence your genome for under $1,000, give you insights about it, secure it using a blockchain, and allow you to do whatever you want with the data. Nebula wants to sequence people’s entire genomes and let them own it, allowing them to earn digital money by sharing it. Readmore>>